Ted Williams' Final Foul

As the Fall Classic approaches, let us turn our attention to the national pastime: “Workers at an Arizona cryonics facility mutilated the frozen head of baseball legend Ted Williams – even using it for a bizarre batting practice, a new tell-all book claims.” Sounds pretty nasty, but the News is embellishing a bit here. Former Alcor Life Extension Foundation executive, Larry Johnson, who wrote the book, isn’t actually saying that employees played baseball with the head. It was a bit different.

Johnson writes that holes were drilled in Williams’ severed head for the insertion of microphones, then frozen in liquid nitrogen while Alcor employees recorded the sounds of Williams’ brain cracking 16 times as temperatures dropped to -321 degrees Fahrenheit.

Johnson writes that the head was balanced on an empty can of Bumble Bee tuna to keep it from sticking to the bottom of its case.

Johnson describes watching as another Alcor employee removed Williams’ head from the freezer with a stick, and tried to dislodge the tuna can by swinging at it with a monkey wrench.

The technician, no .406 hitter like the baseball legend, missed the can with several swings of the wrench and smacked Williams’ head directly, spraying “tiny pieces of frozen head” around the room.